Youth Hockey Rankings

About MyHockeyRankings

MYHockey was developed as a way for fans of youth hockey to spread the love of the game. It started simply as a set of links to hundreds of clubs so people could easily locate clubs/teams to assist in scheduling games. Links were good, but soon it was obvious that we wanted real information about each team, their record, their league, who they are playing, etc. It quickly became apparent a team's record was not a viable indicator of their strength. This led to questions about which team was truly better and exactly how you might measure a team's strength or weakness. Within a year, we realized that the site must have some sort of team rating/ranking to be the tool that we envisioned. What started as a quest for locating opponents of the same skill level, MYHockey Rankings evolved as a tool to help youth hockey coaches, managers, players and fans learn more about the sport we all love.

MYHockey's ratings are computed mathematically, with no subjective weighting. MYHockey computes an average performance rating for each team based upon how well they play against other teams and how good those teams are. There are two real inputs to this rating, they are "AGD" or average goal differential and "SCHED" or strength of schedule. AGD is currently calculated by accumulating the goal differential of each game, to a maximum of 7, and then dividing it by the number of games played. Using a max game goal differential of 7 does "penalize" teams that blow out opponents, but this is common in rating systems as it takes away the incentive for teams to run up scores and allows them to have a bad game by capping the mathematical damage. The strength of schedule is computed by averaging the rating of each game opponent. AGD and SCHED are then added together to compute a team's official rating. A team's rating typically is not reflective of the team's best or worst games, but a mathematically computed average performance rating that translates game scores into a numeric representation of team performance.

About Krach Rankings

Hockey Power Rankings are based upon KRACH, which we believe is the best system to objectively rank teams. KRACH stands for "Ken's Ratings for American College Hockey", named after Ken Butler who first implemented the methodology for college hockey.

KRACH is the implementation of a sophisticated mathematical model known as the Bradley-Terry rating system. While the model is sophisticated, and needs a computer to calculate, its essential meaning is actually quite simple.

The key to understanding KRACH is understanding that it's calculated recursively, so that the end result is self-evident by the results. In other words, if you took one team's schedule to date, and played a theoretical "game" for each game already actually played, using the KRACH ratings themselves in order to predict the winner, then the end result would be a theoretical won-loss percentage that matches the team's actual won-loss percentage. Pretty cool.